Against Marriage:
An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State

Clare Chambers

In Against Marriage Chambers begins with the arguments against
state recognition of marriage and progresses to her vision of how a
marriage-free state would work. The latter, however, is I think the
more interesting — and informs her critique of marriage — so I begin
there and work backwards.

In Chambers' vision of the marriage-free state, personal relationships
would be subject to regulation, "to protect the vulnerable, to secure
justice, to provide legal determinacy, to settle third-party rights
and duties, and to appropriately direct state taxation and provision".
But this would not involve anything like marriage or a civil union.
It would be piecemeal rather than holistic: regulations about care,
cohabitation, economic interdependence, parenting and so forth would exist
independently of one another. This is more flexible than any bundling
of these together, since it avoids assumptions about how people do or
should connect different kinds of relationships. It would be based on
practice rather than status, avoiding different treatment of otherwise
identical relationships just because one was registered and the other not.
And regulations would operate by default, with opt-outs allowed where
consistent with justice.

In the marriage-free state "marriage" would now be left to private
individuals or groups to define. Given the historical power of the term,
however, Chambers argues that there would need to be constraints on
this, such as not allowing underage marriages. More controversially,
she suggests that religions should be bound by anti-discrimination
laws if they wish to proselytise to children and not just adults (in a
similar fashion to private clubs in the UK). She also considers issues
of "internal inequality" within religions, looking in detail at the
Jewish agunah problem, where husbands can indefinitely deny wives a
religious divorce.

An alternative model for a marriage-free state is having relationships
governed by private contract, which Chambers considers in a chapter
"The Limitations of Contract". One problem here is that default
regulations would still be needed. Another is that state enforcement of
relationship contracts would involve violations of liberty and privacy;
the alternative of compensatory fault-based alimony would be a profound
violation of equality.

Returning to Chambers' critique of marriage, she begins Against Marriage
with a survey of egalitarian and feminist criticisms, then in "Marriage as
a Violation of Liberty" presents a political liberal critique of marriage
as "non-neutral". She considers various liberal defences of marriage:
for conveying social meaning, promoting gender equality, enabling caring
relationships, creating citizens, or childraising. These may meet some
liberal requirements — valid public motivations and compatibility with
equality and autonomy — but fail on comparison with an alternative
marriage-free state which can better achieve the same goals.

Against Marriage is an academic work, but one that is broadly
accessible. It stays within the realm of political philosophy and
largely above the detail of legal systems or recommendations, but it
addresses topics of salience in most people's lives and its implications
are fairly immediate. (What concrete references there are are almost
all to the United Kingdom, where Chambers is based, and the broader
English-speaking world.) The style is formal but also straightforward,
and should pose no problems to anyone not averse to moderately formal
language and philosophical precision. And Chambers positions her ideas
in relation to other thinkers and strands of thought, but doesn't assume
any background in political theory — I had no trouble here myself,
though I have to confess to never having read any Rawls. (Chambers is a
"comprehensive" liberal, but her arguments are also directed at political
liberals and in some places libertarians.)

I found Chambers persuasive: Against Marriage compelled me to rethink
some of my ideas on the subject and brought much greater precision to
others. And even those who disagree with much more of it will have to
engage with it, as an integrated and reasonably comprehensive analysis
of how the state should approach marriage.